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MANAGED SERVICES
From the April 2007 |
A better mousetrap by Steve Adams Years ago, one of the more popular pastimes was a board game called Mousetrap, where players moved around a board and competed with one another to build a complex contraption that would eventually cause a trap to come down to capture an opponent’s mouse. The net result was a complicated solution to a fairly simple and straightforward problem. IT managers who are attempting to move their networks from a public switched telephone network (PSTN) to a voice-over-IP (VoIP) solution are finding they have their own version of the game in a ride-along technology: faxes. Unlike voice traffic, which can afford a little latency or drop-off while the packets are being sent, a drop-off or other problem during a fax might mean the entire message is scrapped. As a result, IT managers are finding they have to create complex, time-consuming workarounds in order to do what they used to do by plugging a fax machine (or fax server) into a phone port. While faxes are still important to many industries–real estate, insurance, financial, legal, healthcare and manufacturing come to mind–the ratio of faxes to voice traffic still heavily favors voice. Yet, if the business goal is to eliminate phone lines and the subsequent costs that go with them, then faxes must also be accommodated. There is a solution to this dilemma: Internet fax services, which can provide the benefits of fax over IP (FoIP) without the need to become an expert in faxing protocols such as T.30 and T.38, or the g.711 codecs. With an Internet fax service, tasks such as establishing the call, negotiating the handshake between faxing devices, encoding the message for transmission, message correction and synchronization, and terminating the call are handled off-site. The only responsibility the organization using the fax service has is making sure there is an Internet connection. Users of such fax services also have the choice of sending and receiving faxes through their e-mail accounts or via a secure server. If they use an e-mail account, faxing is generally as easy as sending an e-mail with an attachment. In this case, however, clicking the send button forwards the e-mail to the service, which then converts it into a format that can be transmitted over normal phone lines without worrying about lost packets or jitter. Received faxes come in as attachments to an e-mail message. If users choose to send and receive faxes via a secure server, they log in to the server and follow similar procedures. Either way, the user interface incorporates familiar tools, allowing users to be up and running quickly, with little or no training. One other time saving advantage comes in the provisioning of an Internet fax service versus an internal FoIP application. With the internal application, assigning, enabling and testing the faxing capability is necessary. Even more time goes into solving compatibility and other technical problems that often occur. With an Internet fax service, a personal telephone number is assigned to each user by the service, and users create their own online logins. Other than authorizing its use on corporate desktops, no interaction is required by the IT department. Users are up and running the day it’s authorized, with no impact on internal IT resources.
While building the contraption for the Mousetrap game may have been fun,
spending time creating complex workarounds just so the organization can send
and receive faxes without a PSTN is not. Nor is it necessary. |